Unexpected Consequences of Travel
by Dark Akuma Hunter
Summary: When the Dursleys were on vacation, Harry was expected to be on his best behaviour. But no one could have predicted Lambo and his bazooka. As always, Tsuna is left wondering when all this chaos had become his everyday life. (Minor M/M mentions)
1. Chapter 1

_**A/N:** So basically I'm binge-watching KHR at the moment and I love TYL!Lambo (lets not forget twenty years later Lambo, dang) and I ended up with a bunch of random story ideas BUT I'm trying not to get bogged down with more multi-chapter fics at the moment so this is just a random one-shot instead because I was really bored and had nothing to read._

 _I might write something about the TYL Arc when I'm finished watching it, which would include more backstory about how things get from a to b, but I also might not._

 **Unexpected Consequences of Travel:**

The Dursley family didn't often go on holidays, not even in England and certainly not overseas, but they'd come into some extra money, Dudley had done well (in their eyes) in school that year, and it seemed like a good way to reward him. They had let Dudley choose their destination – Japan, because he'd recently learned that was where Pokemon was created and he thought, perhaps, in his child mind, that he might see one in the flesh; and Namimori, through a process of Dudley pointing at random locations on a series of maps.

(Petunia and Vernon were very proud of their son's decision making skills.)

The only dark spot in this plan was the existence of their much-loathed nephew.

Unfortunately, after darkening their doorstep almost six years ago with a vaguely threatening letter, they had been unable to do anything about the boy, and everyone in their neighbourhood knew about the second boy who lived in the Dursley household. There was no one they could leave him with – it would ruin them for months if any of their neighbours caught sight of the boy while they were overseas, and the likelihood of grievous bodily injury or even death at the hands of Vernon's sister Marge (accidentally, of course, she was just a rough sort with little patience) was too high to risk the wrath of the man who had left that very letter – and so their only choice was to take him along.

Dudley hadn't been happy about that decision, but they placated him with sweets and all was forgotten, at least momentarily.

Harry Potter, the unfortunate nephew in question, wasn't sure how to feel about the whole ordeal.

The six year old (who would be seven soon enough, not that his family seemed to care) had mixed memories from the last time he'd been dragged along on a family vacation. He hadn't been allowed the share the second double bed in their motel room with Dudley, instead having to make his own little nest on the floor in the corner of the room, but they _did_ ostensibly treat him better than they usually did when they were under the public eye, which meant cheap food when usually there would be none, thrift store clothes that while definitely not new fit better than Dudley's cast-offs, and threatening looks instead of raised voices or fists.

A child with a normal upbringing wouldn't consider those to be particularly noteworthy or positive improvements, but to Harry, those tiny moments of faux-care muddied the waters in his mind when he tried to decide how he felt about his family.

He didn't want to be treated like Dudley was – the only reason he remained unharmed more often than not was because Dudley was unfit and slow on his feet, so Harry would never so easily give up his one advantage – but he also knew deep down that the disparity between them was unusual. There was no word he could put to the feeling – child neglect was a foreign term to him at this stage in his life – but he didn't need to name it to know it, and he held the feeling close, allowing it to make him cautious and obedient and observant.

Going overseas was suspicious, to Harry, who occasionally still had dreams – which he couldn't decide whether or not to call nightmares – about being abandoned in faraway places where he would never burden his aunt and uncle again. Except something deep inside him, the same thing that told him something was wrong with this lifestyle, assured him that, for whatever reason, they would absolutely bring him back home again (regardless of whether or not that was deemed to be the best outcome).

After all, if they were just going to leave him behind, why not ditch him in York, or any of the other places they'd stopped at the one time they thought taking Dudley on a road-trip would be a good idea?

 **oOoOo**

If the way they had taken to mostly wandering the streets – despite Dudley's protestations against excessive movement – was any indication, perhaps letting Dudley pick their destination with no frame of reference hadn't been a great idea.

Harry hadn't had any pre-set idea of what Japan was supposed to be like, but he thought Dudley might've been expecting lots of theme parks and flashing lights. There was **an** amusement park in Namimori, but it obviously hadn't lived up to Dudley's expectations, and even Harry hadn't been overly upset about not being allowed near any of the rides.

It was also only after their arrival that Harry discovered that his relatives – particularly his uncle – seemed to take issue with the general lack of English speakers in the town. If two people who could only speak English were annoyed that people in another country only spoke their own language, shouldn't they have just gone to America?

Somehow, being in a new place, away from the familiarity of Little Winging, Harry was suddenly extremely self-conscious about the way the Dursleys acted. After all, the people back home already knew their family, but the people in Namimori were all strangers! Shouldn't they be trying to make a better impression? It made him glad for the way that, away from tightly-packed crowds – which were few and far between here – his aunt and uncle preferred it if he trailed along a handful of metres behind them.

In the same way that they pretended Harry didn't exist, Harry could pretend that he hadn't come with this trio and their loud voices and pointed remarks which, thankfully, barely anyone in town could understand well enough to take insult from.

Today they were wandering about a residential district.

Dudley was complaining about video games and how Japan wasn't as cool as it had sounded, while Harry was entertaining himself by looking at the nameplates in front of each house and wondering what they might say.

(This trip would inspire an interest in languages that would keep him sequestered away in the public library for long hours of merciful freedom from the oppressive atmosphere of Number Four Privet Drive.)

Loud voices and an explosive bang – surely not an actual explosion, who would be blowing things up? – drew Harry's attention away from the nameplates and up the street where the rest of his family were walking two houses ahead of him.

They were the only people in the street, until suddenly a child – a bit younger than Harry but not really a toddler either – dashed out into the street in a blur of cow-print and dark hair only to collide at speed with his uncle's leg.

It was like watching a train-wreck.

The kid, who had been shouting, bounced off of Harry's uncle's leg and fell to the ground, momentarily silenced. His uncle snarled down at the kid, fists clenched at his sides and his face starting to turn that particularly nasty colour it went whenever he was about to yell at Harry for something that he probably didn't even do. For one wild, heart-stopping moment, Harry thought his uncle might actually take a swing at the poor kid, but thankfully his aunt intervened, putting a hand on his shoulder and muttering something Harry couldn't hear as he warily inched closer, a collection of other children of varying ages spilling from the gate of the same house.

Harry didn't often have cause to be truly grateful for anything his aunt did, but pulling his uncle back from the edge – almost physically pulling him away, too, with surprising strength for so bony a body – and averting an incident without much drama save for a vitriolic jab about bad parenting and brats who didn't deserve to be let out of the house, that was something he would always be thankful for.

(Other people's wellbeing had always been more important than Harry's, even at that age.)

His aunt and uncle stormed off, hustling Dudley down the street, but Harry lingered, his steps slow and hesitant.

The kid who had collided with his uncle was on the verge of tears, and a silver-haired teenager had the sort of furious look on his face that implied he was one of the few people in town with a working knowledge of English.

That realisation meant that Harry could, and should, attempt to apologise for his uncle's behaviour. With that thought in mind, Harry's steps became purposeful, and he approached the small group with all the dignity a child of almost seven could muster.

The boy with the silver hair glanced over at him when he got close, scowling heavily, but Harry didn't let it deter him.

He came to a stop a step or two away from the boy in the cow-print, who was murmuring tearfully to himself, and felt the eyes of three teenagers and a suit-wearing toddler fall upon him.

Harry twisted the hem of his shirt between his fingers, nervous at the attention, before steeling himself and taking a deep breath.

"I'm sorry," he said, ducking his head, not sure how to explain or encompass everything about the entire situation that he wanted to apologise for. "It was my fault," he continued somewhat reflexively, because _everything_ was always his fault, so why should this be any different?

Peeking up from the ground, Harry saw the toddler's face shadowed by his down-turned fedora, a conflicted expression upon the silver-haired teen's face, and a look of slowly-dawning terror on the brunet before suddenly his vision was encompassed in pink.

 **oOoOo**

When Harry opened his eyes – when had he closed them? – he found himself in an unfamiliar kitchen with the boy in the cow-print. He was crying, but Harry wasn't sure how to comfort anyone, since no one ever comforted him. They were somewhere strange and different though, so maybe there was someone around who could help where Harry couldn't?

Harry was edging towards the doorway at the other end of the room when he happened to glance up and catch sight of a cooling rack full of freshly baked biscuits.

If this was home, and Harry so much as _thought_ about taking one of them, he'd be in a world of trouble; baking was never for him. But this wasn't his house. They also weren't his biscuits, and normally he wouldn't chance it, but he was somewhere strange and the only piece of familiarity he had, however miniscule, was currently upset. Biscuits made people happy, right?

So Harry stood on his tiptoes and snatched one from the edge of the cooling rack.

Shuffling back over to his tearful companion, he held the biscuit out in silent offering, unsure of what to say or even if the boy understood English in the first place.

Maybe the smell of warm sugar and chocolate caught his attention. The boy immediately stopped crying when he laid eyes on the biscuit, and Harry knew, even if this might be stealing, that he had done the right thing.

Stretching his arm out further in offering, Harry watched as the boy slowly took the biscuit from him, holding it almost reverently, before stuffing half of it in his mouth.

Harry laughed at his enthusiasm and sat beside him on the floor. Part of him had wanted to explore this strange place – hadn't they been outside? – but this was nice too. He'd made an apology of sorts to the boy tormented by his uncle, and he'd managed to snatch a couple of minutes for himself as well.

His uncle would be furious if he disappeared for too long, but he could worry about that later. For right now, he would try and relax.

 **oOoOo**

In the streets of Namimori, Sawada Tsunayoshi could only stare in horror as an innocent civilian child – a foreigner at that – was caught in the crossfire of Lambo's Ten-Year Bazooka.

Not for the first time, he wondered what on earth the Bovino Famiglia were thinking when they gave something like that to a _five year old_.

Before his mind had too much time to panic, the pink smoke cleared to reveal two teenagers in place of the two children.

The older Lambo looked the same as he always did whenever they had a bazooka incident: cow-print shirt, black blazer, one green eye closed in the sort of lazy nonchalance Tsuna could only ever dream of possessing. He had a biscuit hanging from his mouth, but even still Tsuna could imagine his deep voice rumbling his usual greeting of 'Young Vongola' – something that he ignored every time because one day he would convince these people that he wasn't going to join their famiglia.

What surprised Tsuna was the second figure, the future version of that poor child who had really only been passing by at the most unfortunate moment. He was dressed casually in jeans and a tee, with glasses settled across the bridge of his nose and an odd, polished stick poking out of his waistband. But more than any of that, it was the plate in the dark-haired teen's hands that drew Tsuna's attention.

The stranger was carrying a plate of biscuits. The same sort of biscuit that Lambo was eating.

A strangled sound of confusion left Tsuna's mouth, which normally would have earned him some sort of physical reprimand from Reborn, but the toddler seemed unusually interested in this turn of events and hadn't bothered.

"Oh." The stranger blinked dark green eyes behind his glasses at the sound and glanced around him. Then, looking straight at Tsuna, he said in stilted but fluent Japanese, "Woah. Am I older than Tsuna right now?"

Beside him, Lambo let out a low chuckle. The stranger slapped him on the shoulder.

"See Lambo, I told you it was about this time of year! Otherwise I'd have been at school and I wouldn't even have been in Japan in the first place."

"So?" Lambo asked, "How's it stack up?"

Tsuna had no idea what they were talking about. His brain was stuck on the part where somehow Lambo and the stranger were well-acquainted in the future.

Was this his fault? Had he dragged some kid into the mafia simply by existing?

"Super weird," the stranger decided. "Not that the time turner wasn't weird too. Being in the same time and place as your three-hours-ago self was spooky on an existential level, but being older than everyone else is really throwing me off-balance. I'm glad it's only for five minutes."

While this nonsensical conversation was taking place, Lambo's hand snuck forward to snatch another biscuit off the plate the stranger was holding. Attention drawn to his hands, the stranger seemed to remember that he was, indeed, carrying food.

Glancing around again he smiled when he spotted I-Pin. Crouching down said something in Chinese and offered the plate to her. I-Pin took one with a shy smile. Then the stranger stood back up and offered the plate to all of them.

It was surreal.

Yamamoto took one with a wide smile. Gokudera glared suspiciously at them. Reborn took two.

Some indignant part of Tsuna wanted to protest that, but the stranger just laughed.

"What famiglia are you from?" Reborn asked bluntly, not even bothering to ask for a name first.

The stranger glanced at Lambo, who rolled his eye. An inside joke?

"Vongola-adjacent?" the stranger replied, voice – was that a British accent? – lilting upwards in question. "Bovino-ish? I'm not technically 'affiliated'." He made exaggerated air quotes with his free hand. "Does dating a Mafioso make you a part of their famiglia?"

Tsuna choked on an inhale. Dating? Dating who? What?

"Congratulations on finding someone who'll put up with your cry-baby self," Reborn said, part mocking and part genuine.

Tsuna felt the world grind to a halt.

Lambo?

Lambo and the stranger were dating?

The stranger had willingly involved himself with the mafia?

What kind of person even did that?

There were so many things Tsuna wanted to ask, but time was ever marching forwards, and before he could voice any of them there was a burst of pink smoke, and they both returned to their own time.

The five year old Lambo had biscuit crumbs on his face and a wide smile that spoke of sugar and predicted chaos – not that he wasn't chaotic enough on a day to day basis. He let out a joyful shriek and raced into the house, likely to go bother Tsuna's mother for food.

The other child was staring contemplatively at his hands, possibly unaware that he'd even moved from wherever they'd gone to in the future.

Tsuna thought about saying something – or rather, getting Gokudera or Reborn to say something since Tsuna could barely string two words together in English – when he caught sight of the overweight man who had started this whole fiasco storming back down the street towards them.

Tsuna's flight-or-fight response leaned definitively towards flight at all times, and this was no different, but morbid curiosity, and Reborn's weight on his shoulder and the calculating look in his dark eyes, kept him rooted to the spot.

Since the moment the bazooka went off five minutes ago, part of Tsuna had been lamenting the fate of this child who had been touched by the mafia through no fault of his own. But when the child flinched away violently, finally taking notice of the purple-faced man's approach and his noticeable anger, something else flickered to life inside Tsuna.

It didn't matter what happened over the next ten years to get from Point A to Point B. If that child could survive ten years with that behemoth of a man and still find it in his heart to love and laugh and smile, then that was all that mattered.

Maybe this was one mafia induction he didn't need to worry about.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** _Okay so I'm up to episode 154 so you can probably guess where this ends._

 _In this series Harry has mist flames which is an arbitrary choice I made because of one scene I wanted to write - I don't have any opinions on what cloud type would best suit him._

 _This chapter, like the previous, is mostly a whole lot of nothing, but you guys seemed to dig it anyway so here's some more._

 **TYL Arc:**

Harry stared in disbelief at the sheepish, battle-worn group who had just returned to the base.

It had been bad enough when Reborn showed up out of nowhere! Now the effect was, what, spreading?

Harry knew he should have protested harder when they suggested he remain at the base while Lambo and I-Pin went to retrieve Haru and Kyoko. How were they supposed to have each other's backs if he wasn't there?

 _This can't be happening_ , he thought to himself, collapsing to his knees in shock.

The teenage versions of the adults he'd come to know and trust stared at him in confusion and distant concern. Because, of course, they had no idea who he was, or why he was panicking.

"Why Lambo and I-Pin?" he muttered to himself.

Regardless of what was happening or how it was happening, he could excuse the others to some extent. They were still teenagers like this, they could take care of themselves (sort of). But Lambo and I-Pin were only _five_ now; I-Pin in particular was more capable than your average five year old, but a child is still a child no matter how skilled they are at martial arts.

What if it kept spreading?

What if it got Harry himself, or Fuuta? Bianchi would be able to fend for herself, no problem, but a six or seven year old Harry would be worse than useless, his only saving grace his ability to keep quiet and stay out of the way.

A loud, somewhat surprised exclamation of, "Lambo's boyfriend?!" broke Harry out of his quickly spiralling thoughts.

He glanced up from the floor, blinking up at the younger Tsuna, who had slapped a hand over his own mouth and was flushing in embarrassment.

Right. Harry hadn't exactly introduced himself further than his name in the brief time Tsuna and Gokudera had been at the base before going out after Lambo and I-Pin – he should have insisted on going with them – but he had been hit with Lambo's Ten Year Bazooka before. Seems Tsuna had just made the connection.

Taking a steadying breath, Harry climbed back to his feet.

"Yes. And I'd ask why my boyfriend and one of my best friends are currently five, but I get the feeling you don't know." He looked over the group again, and a sense of unease settled over him. "It's unsettling to suddenly be one of the oldest people in the base."

Harry ignored the whispers of the girls, who had the lowest amount of knowledge to try and understand the current situation and were stuck on the confused topic of how a five year old wound up with a seventeen year old boyfriend, and slunk away into the base.

He needed to get away from them for now. Just until he could come to terms with their present reality. Just a small break.

 **oOoOo**

In his room, Harry reaffirmed for himself his own commitment.

They may no longer be the people who remembered him, but they were still the people Harry loved.

Harry had come here to support the family who had supported him, and this confusing series of events wasn't enough to derail that.

He'd _abandoned_ the wizarding world in the dark of night when he caught word of Tsunayoshi's assassination from a tearful Lambo and a stoic but distraught I-Pin, leaving behind a letter for Ron and Hermione that was light on specifics but heavy with intent: Harry wasn't the only god damned wizard in the UK and he damned well shouldn't have to be the only person trying to fight Voldemort, but his _family_ were in a bad place, and he would not abandon them.

To have two of the most important adults in his life perish within less than twelve months of each other? It was a blow he hadn't been expecting. That none of them, despite being a mafia famiglia, had truly ever expected.

As a younger teen, saved from dreadful summers with the Dursleys by his friendship with Lambo, Tsuna had always seemed infallible to Harry, immortal. Gentle and open and caring in all the ways his blood family weren't.

Reality loved taking those things away from him.

 **oOoOo**

Despite his time with the DA, Harry didn't consider himself much of a teacher, not of magic and even less so of physical combat, so he didn't have much to offer in direct support of the young Vongola guardians. Gokudera in particular wouldn't trust the words of a stranger if he tried his hand at explaining any of the worldly dynamics that had changed in the last decade, so even if Harry thought he'd be able to concisely explain any of it the effort wouldn't be worth the retort.

All of this meant he ended up putting his ill-gained domestic skills to work, spending time with Haru and Kyoko and babysitting the kids.

Lambo had started to calm down, personality-wise, when Harry first interacted with him in a real sense, but he'd heard enough stories about his childhood that the boisterous and generally self-centred five year old he was presented with wasn't a total shock to the system. He could only be thankful that I-Pin hadn't secretly been a Terror Child.

Keeping Lambo out of trouble should really be considered a full-time job. If nothing else, Harry found a new level of respect for the Vongola who had had to deal with this Lambo for so many years. Even if he didn't drive you up the wall it was exhausting trying to keep a watchful eye on him.

 **oOoOo**

The base was a sizeable thing, but even without the added knowledge that you were underground, being under continuous lockdown for days on end was enough to drive anyone a little stir-crazy.

The mental fatigue was obvious in all of their visitors from the past; some handling it better than others.

Harry convinced I-Pin to train with him in the mornings after breakfast. The older I-Pin had been teaching Harry martial arts over the summer, and they would often also study together, Harry hopelessly lost in many aspects while I-Pin learned through teaching. It was sad, without her around, but he could continue practicing katas with the younger I-Pin to correct his stances, and it also gave her a break from her self-appointed job of trying to keep Lambo out of trouble.

He always did the dishes from lunch, even when the girls protested, because even if they wanted to try and keep busy they still needed to take a break for themselves every now and again.

In the afternoons, Harry dedicated himself to trying to keep Lambo effectively and _safely_ entertained, so that he wouldn't get underfoot and annoy the wrong person at the wrong time. Of course this wasn't always a successful endeavour, because Lambo could be incredibly stealthy if he wanted to be – he just usually didn't.

In the evenings, Harry would tell stories to I-Pin and Lambo, illustrated by his mist flames, until they were tired enough to fall asleep. It made him wistful for a pleasant childhood of his own, but as he had yet to be caught up in their strange spontaneous time-travel he didn't imagine his younger counterpart getting a free break from the Dursleys any time soon.

 **oOoOo**

Joining the mafia hadn't been an intentional decision for Harry.

Thankfully, the same could probably be said about most of the Decimo's guardians, and several other adjacent members of the Vongola Famiglia.

One _could_ say that it all started with that fateful first trip to Japan, but Harry tended to refer to the well-meaning but ultimately misguided Extracurricular International Pen-Pal project that was set up at Harry and Dudley's primary school at the beginning of their final year.

Dudley, upon hearing those words and immediately connecting them with homework, decided independently, in all his childish wisdom, that signing Harry up for it would be some sort of great punishment.

That Dudley was the one who brought it up at home, so obviously proud of himself, was the only reason Harry could think of for the Dursleys allowing Harry to participate.

It might sound cruel to call the project misguided, but children had short attention spans, and from what started as a decent sized group, Harry was one of only three people he was aware of who were still actually participating by the time the year ended.

Harry's pen-pal?

One Lambo Bovino.

Already an impressive budding polyglot, Lambo was one of the few people on the other end of the project with a confident enough grasp of the English language to really get into any sort of conversation. Not only that, but he had a _lot_ to say, and was still obviously in the process of learning what things he should and shouldn't talk about.

In the beginning, Harry had considered a lot of it make-believe and childish exaggerations. Later, he privately considered it a miracle that somehow no one had considered their letters to be breaking Omerta, even though they totally were.

The one thing he did entirely of his own volition on that first venture into Diagon Alley was to set up a forwarding address so he could continue the letter exchange even while he was at Hogwarts; he wasn't about to let _magic_ deprive him of his first and only friend.

Looking back on it, Lambo might not have been the only one with loose lips. One too many honest confessions about the Dursleys over the years and the ill-advised but vague mentions of the life-threatening dangers he encountered during his first and second years at Hogwarts had something entirely unexpected happening: a rescue, of sorts.

Not long after arriving home for the summer after his second year, maybe a day after that dreadful announcement that Vernon's sister, Marge, would be visiting at some point over the break, a blond man with an entourage of men in black suits showed up at Number Four.

Harry had been shooed upstairs to his room the moment the doorbell rang but, to the surprise of everyone residing at Number Four, the blond was there for Harry.

His name was Dino, and he said something about doing a favour for his little brother, who was doing a favour for a family member (and Harry hadn't known what that odd emphasis had meant at the time), and then he'd produced a letter that was from Lambo begging Harry to come spend the summer with him instead of his wretched relatives.

Harry's Aunt and Uncle hadn't even had time to decide if they were for or against the idea when two of the suit-clad men came back downstairs with Harry's trunk and Hedwig's cage and Dino whisked him out the door.

He had learned a lot that summer.

About the mafia.

About Lambo's 'family'.

About Dying Will flames.

About _his_ flames, gone active when faced with death via basilisk venom, or when Professor Quirrell-who-was-really-sort-of-Voldemort tried to kill him in first year, or when he was fifteen months old and struck with an infallible killing curse only to live to tell the tale.

About the difference between family – people you're related to by blood – and _family_ – people who care about you.

It was when he gained a whole ton of new secrets to keep from Hermione and Ron, and then Remus and Sirius, and eventually the entire Order and all of his friends.

(Hermione and Ron knew he had a pen-pal. Dumbledore was aware and _unhappy_ that he was spending summers out of the country, but wasn't able to do anything about it other than give him disappointed looks and make leading statements that Harry would either purposely misunderstand or ignore entirely.)

His Hogwarts days and his summers with Lambo and the Vongola were both important to him. He hadn't expected to need to choose between them, especially before graduation, but life never did play fair when Harry was involved. And so he picked what was most important to him in the moment, in the immediate future.

He missed the castle, but he didn't regret his choice.

If they survived this, defeated the Millefiore, defeated _Byakuran_ , Harry could always go back.

Sometimes, when he can't sleep, he would ponder Lambo's reaction to different sorts of wizarding candy.

He needed to believe there was a future beyond this, or he would let despair eat away at him.

 **oOoOo**

Several weeks and a handful of escape incidents later, Harry could tell that the tension in the base was only increasing.

Other than learning how they worked and practicing to make sure he _could_ utilise them if he needed to, Harry had never really made much use of his flames or his box weapons. Now though, he'd had a brilliant idea to try and ease some of the stir-crazy from being trapped underground.

Harry sought out the largest empty room in the base aside from the training room, and when he found it, he sat in the middle of the room and tried to envision what he wanted to do.

Harry had two box weapons. One was simply a staff, which he had been learning to use in combat. The other was an area-alteration type box. Someone with Ron's strategic mind would better be able to make use of it in a combat situation, but for something like this Harry could use it just fine.

When Harry was satisfied with the image in his head, he activated his flames and fed a decent amount into his box, eyes closed and concentrating all the while. He opened his eyes after activating his box and smiled.

Instead of a pale, empty room in an unfurnished part of the base, Harry was now sitting in a grassy field, bordered by a picket fence which he had envisioned to mark out where the walls of the room were in reality. To one side, there was a swing-set and a slide; to the other, a picnic table. There was a gentle heat from an imaginary sun, and just the slightest of breezes.

If he turned around, the only discrepancy of the space was the entrance to the room, which Harry had left as it was. If he wanted to bring people here, they needed a way to get in after all.

Walking the length of the room and running his hands along everything his box had created, Harry nodded to himself. Yes, this could definitely work.

But first, there was some other prep he wanted to. Reverting the room to its natural appearance, Harry left, already feeling a little lighter.

 **oOoOo**

Harry's face – and general existence – wasn't well known outside of the Vongola Decimo's guardians and general inner circle and Dino Chiavarone. Because of this, and his familiarity with this time and the situation as it stood, not to mention his own skills, he was permitted to come and go from the base in a manner that the time travellers were not.

Up until now he hadn't really bothered to make use of this fact, other than for one or two sanctioned grocery runs.

Now though he had something else in mind.

There were lots of things that could be considered comfort food, and lots of comfort foods that couldn't easily be made with the sort of ingredients they had stocked the base with, but Harry figured that maybe a bit of comfort food was something they all needed right about now.

It was time to do some shopping.

 **oOoOo**

"Kyoko," Harry called when he spotted her in the hallway after returning to the base. "You have a map of the base, right?"

"Yes. Did you need it for something?"

Harry shrugged. "Do you have it on you?"

"Ah, no. It's in my room. Do you want…?"

"I can wait here while you grab it."

"Right…"

Harry busied himself with checking his stasis charms while Kyoko wandered off, bemused, to retrieve the map Giannini had given her.

Even not knowing what Harry wanted, she was always very prompt.

"Cool," Harry said when he saw her coming back. He fished a pen from his pocket and took the map when Kyoko offered it to him. He circled the room he'd found and pointed at it. "Could you find Haru, Lambo and I-Pin, then meet me here in 10-15 minutes?

"I can… Can I ask why?"

Harry smiled at her. "It's a surprise."

The word 'surprise' seemed to shake off her mild trepidation – which he totally understood, since good things were sort of in short supply around the base.

He would've invited some of the guys, but he knew they were all busy with their training. He'd try and do something for them if he could, but it might just be too hard to organise.

Beaming back at him, Kyoko skipped off to do as he'd asked, and Harry headed down to prepare the room.

Closer to twenty minutes later – they must have had trouble wrangling Lambo – Harry ushered the quartet into his false paradise.

The kids had zero qualms or misgivings about the place, Lambo letting out a gleeful laugh and dashing off towards the swings, I-Pin on his heels with an excited grin.

Haru and Kyoko however glanced around in disbelief.

Harry gently guided them over to the picnic table. "Don't think about it too hard," he advised. "You'll ruin the magic."

Then he winked, and set the shopping bag he'd brought down earlier on the table.

"It's warm," Haru commented, staring up at the fake sky in wonder.

"Well, it would be a terrible surprise if it was raining."

As he said that Harry took out two small boxes and two cake forks and set them down in front of the girls.

They stared at him in confusion – still thrown by the room itself – but Harry merely gestured at the boxes, waiting for them to take a look.

"I don't know what day you usually do it on, but you two have been busy, and I thought maybe today could be a sort of interim Haru-and-Kyoko Appreciation Day?"

"Has there been cake hidden away somewhere this whole time?!" Haru asked indignantly, as if, were the answer to be yes, she would rage against everyone who kept that secret from her.

Harry laughed.

"No, I bought these this morning. They're from a popular store, but I'm not sure if it was open ten years ago. If you don't like them I can try and find something more familiar."

"No!" Kyoko protested almost as soon as Harry finished speaking. "This is already so much. I can't believe you went out just to buy this. Isn't it dangerous out there?"

Well, they had both been outside of the base since arriving, and neither trip had been uneventful. It was a fair question.

"I'm a master of stealth. But I'll stay put if you prefer."

"It's just, it would be horrible if something happened to you."

"Well," Harry held his arms out and spun in a slow circle. "As you can see, I'm in one piece, perfectly unharmed. And if you don't eat that Lambo's going to notice and come steal it from you."

Haru hunched protectively over her cake, no doubt a reflex from one too many incidents where Lambo had done that exact thing.

"Just relax, yeah? Take some time to unwind."

Picking up the bag Harry wandered across the room to sit on the grass between the swings and the slide, watching Lambo and I-Pin have a chance to play around with something that _wasn't_ potentially dangerous for once.

When the initial excitement and novelty of the room began to wear off, Harry unpacked the rest of the items in the bag.

With a thought, Harry dispelled the stasis charms he'd put on the two containers of takoyaki he'd purchased.

Lambo noticed the _instant_ Harry set them on the grass, and I-Pin, always keeping watch over Lambo with one eye, followed after him.

Harry could only smile fondly as Lambo shrieked in delight, and keep an eye on him to make sure he didn't steal any of I-Pin's food for once in his life.

Harry had also replenished the candy stash in his room while he was out, but Lambo didn't need to know about that. Those were for special occasions.

They basked under the fake sun, enjoying this reprieve, until Harry noticed the edges of the illusion start to weaken and fluctuate. Then he gently ushered them all out of the room and, once they were gone, deactivated his box.

The room itself felt emptier than ever now, but Harry felt like he'd been able to shake off some of the tension that had built up the longer their temporally misplaced guests hung around.

He'd like to call that a job well done.

 **oOoOo**

Harry stared down Kusakabe and Chrome, suspiciously eyeing the overlarge bag Kusakabe was carrying. It was obvious that they intended to leave – Harry had stumbled across them just outside of the connecting doorway to Hibari's compound – and while Kusakabe, as one of Hibari's men and not technically part of the Vongola, was well within his rights to leave the base whenever he pleased, Harry wasn't keen on the picture it made when paired with the previously unconscious Chrome Dokuro.

"Going somewhere?" Harry asked, both amused and wary of the way Chrome refused to look at him and Kusakabe tried in vain to keep the bag out of sight.

Harry could swear he heard voices coming from that thing.

Kusakabe, one of the last people in the base who actually _knew_ Harry, was being oddly shifty. If Hibari saw him acting like this he'd probably be punished.

"I know you aren't going to back up Hibari. One, he'd be offended by the insinuation that he couldn't do it alone, and two, he hates mist users, especially Mukuro, and, by extension, Chrome. And going for a stroll with an injured girl who should probably still be resting seems a little off-brand."

Keeping his tone light and free of accusation seemed to do the trick; although his answer came not from Kusakabe, but from the heart-stopping sight of two small heads emerging from that damned bag and peeking over Kusakabe's shoulders at him.

"Lambo's gonna help!" he proclaimed proudly, eyes wide and mischievous and totally unaware of the real ramifications of what was going on.

"I-Pin helps too!"

Heart in his throat, Harry carefully swallowed back his immediate, vehement protestation to what he suddenly understood the situation to be.

Kusakabe wasn't _that_ reckless and he certainly wasn't that much of a pushover. This couldn't be an entirely spur-of-the-moment plan.

But… taking the kids?

Steeling himself Harry ran a quick mental inventory – wand, check; rings, check; boxes, check – and then determinedly met Kusakabe's gaze.

"Take me with you and I won't tell Reborn what you're doing."

Chrome glanced timidly towards Kusakabe, her hands white-knuckled around her trident.

"… I don't…"

Harry sighed.

"You don't have to expend your flames on me, I can protect myself. Also, I have a better idea, at least for the time being."

Over the last few years, the magical governments of many countries with significant mafia populations – Italy and Japan first and foremost – had begun loosening their laws regarding use of underage magic and use of magic around muggles. (Britain, in true Ministry of Magic fashion, refused to follow suite.) This was largely because they weren't blind, and unrest had been steadily building amongst the mafia; muggles outnumbered magicals many times over, and if someone needed to cast a few spells to get out of danger, well, they were going to stop writing everyone up for it.

Harry drew his wand. Explaining the effects as he went, he cast disillusionment charms and notice-me-not charms on everyone in their group.

"Hold your awareness of each other in your minds, so you don't get overwhelmed and lose each other. And remember," he added, turning to Lambo and I-Pin in Kusakabe's stupid bag, "You have to stay quiet. The harder someone thinks someone should be there, the more they can see through the spells, so you can't give them reason to be suspicious."

Chrome stared wide-eyed at her hand. Harry knew how disorienting it could be, knowing where your body was but having your perception of it altered; you could see yourself more clearly than other people could, but there was still a ghost-like translucence to your form.

"This… isn't an illusion…"

"No, it's not. Now's not really the time to explain though, if you're still putting your plan in motion."

There was a moment of considering silence, but they both assented.

"Okay then. It's your plan, lead the way."

 **oOoOo**

Harry fought as hard as he could inside Merone Base, using magic to shift rubble and cause distractions and his fists during confrontations, but he'd known even before he offered to come with them that his usefulness was limited.

He was just one teenager, going up against a group of ruthless and experienced adults, and if the last time he'd been in a situation like this was any indicator (the Department of Mysteries still occasionally starred in his nightmares) it was obvious that sometimes (so much of the time) enthusiasm and willpower just couldn't stand up to hard-earned life experience.

Ultimately, he was disappointed but not surprised when they were inevitably captured. The one plus side was that they'd managed to prevent Lambo and I-Pin from getting roughed up.

They had been enthusiastic and helpful, but he still didn't feel right about having brought them along in the first place.

 **oOoOo**

Irie Shoichi was…

Well, he was.

It felt like they'd spent forever plotting the man's demise, and then suddenly it just… wasn't necessary.

Harry could sympathise with being caught between a rock and a hard place, and knowing that Tsuna had been in on the plan eased some of his discontent, but there was a dark place in his heart that had flared vehemently into life upon spotting Lambo – _his_ Lambo, the Lambo from this time – and finding out he was trapped inside that god damned machine, and _that_ part of him would never forgive Irie for this.

Even when his logical brain understood things like world-changing crises and a lack of options, the fragile child inside of him, who had had to scrape together a patchwork family with his own hands, screamed and raged at how easily his precious people had been taken from him, fate of the world be damned.

When the others went back to the base to prepare to return to their own time, Harry didn't go with them.

Now that he knew where Lambo was – where his family was – he wasn't moving. He would keep his vigil in Irie Shoichi's ruined lab and guard that device with everything he had until they were back in front of him where they belonged.


	3. Chapter 3

**A World Without Mare – New Beginnings:**

 _Summary: Harry Potter is eight years old when he receives a sudden influx of memories from a life he hasn't lived. This changes everything.  
_

* * *

When Harry Potter was eight, he spent three days locked inside his cupboard, feverish and confused and drifting in and out of consciousness. When he recovered, he had memories of doing things he'd never done, of living a life longer than his mere eight years, and he didn't know what to do about it.

Part of him wanted to write it off as a dream. Sometimes Harry had very odd dreams. But Harry had always, _always_ , been able to tell, in his gut, when something was a dream and when something was real. Usually, this sense of realness only resonated with the disquieting dreams he sometimes had about a bright green light and a woman's voice, but now, all of a sudden, the number of things he knew but didn't know had grown exponentially.

Even if he may have been asleep at the time – he couldn't be sure either way – those memories of flashy battles and friendship and love and pain and _success_ , those weren't something cooked up by his feverish brain. Somehow, someway, those were real.

Harry had never needed anyone else to confirm or back up his instinctual definitions of reality and illusion. But this was so big, so much larger than himself, and there was a memory of an address burning bright in his mind…

In Harry's first act of true, intended rebellion and subterfuge against the Dursley family, Harry secreted away pen and paper and an envelope and a collection of coins over a series of days, then vanished to the local post office after school one day to send the letter he'd written.

The return address he gave was for a house on Privet Drive that was currently empty – he wasn't stupid enough to believe that, if someone did reply, his aunt and uncle would let him have the letter if it came to their house.

After he sent the letter – trying to buy postage stamps had gotten him a mixture of odd looks and affectionate coos from the post office staff – he checked the empty house's letterbox as often as he could.

When he finally received a reply, Harry felt something in himself settle, like he'd been walking on eggshells this whole time, waiting for the other shoe to drop, only now he didn't have to.

It was real.

He hadn't been wrong.

 **oOoOo**

Over the two-and-a-half odd years between first receiving those memories and his eleventh birthday, Harry's life switched tracks once more.

In one universe, the Dursleys never took that trip to Japan.

In another, Harry only delved into that world of dying will flames and the mafia after being signed up for a pen-pal project at school.

In this life, Harry exchanged sporadic correspondence with the people from his memories – through Reborn, mostly – and took his time and his life into his own hands.

By his eleventh birthday Harry was at least semi-fluent in both Italian and Japanese, and he'd been training on his own to figure out his flames, and to learn the parts of them he'd never bothered with in that other life.

When his Hogwarts letter arrived, it was simple to hide it away with an illusion until he could read it in private.

When he went to Diagon Alley, his mist flames concealed the scar that the future him seemed to hate, granting him anonymity.

Though he knew he would have to drop the illusion once at school, Harry kept his scar hidden on the long train ride which marked the start of the next chapter of his life, and the trip managed to pass by without anyone asking about his dead parents.

 **oOoOo**

Dying Will flames weren't magic, and magic was nothing like flames.

In theory, Harry had known that, but experiencing it first-hand was different.

He knew better than to use flames in front of civilians, but that didn't mean he couldn't poke and prod and dig into the issue.

Eventually Harry learned that Wizards and Witches – at least those in the UK – didn't go in for the sorts of magic that was reflective of his flames. McGonagall huffed something about 'performance magic' in the same sort of tone that Harry's old maths teacher had complained about 'soft sciences', and every other answer Harry received followed in a similar vein.

All in all that meant that in this world, Harry was uniquely skilled, but it also meant he could never use his illusions to supplement any of his magic while at school.

Given that he'd never had any plans of utilising his flames during the school year, he found it oddly disheartening to discover the sort of attitude the adults held towards illusory magic.

 **oOoOo**

Ron and Hermione were wonderful friends, but, even as their friendship shifted and solidified and strengthened through their adventures and over time, Harry couldn't help but be impatient for the end of the school year.

While jumping through several more hoops to achieve it, Harry had continued corresponding with Reborn and Sawada Tsunayoshi throughout the year, and, knowing more than most about his home situation, the eighteen year old Vongola Decimo had extended an invitation – or Reborn had offered one without consultation; Harry remembered enough about Reborn's personality to know that that was totally a possibility – for Harry to stay with his family in Japan over the summer break.

At first Harry had been terribly hesitant to accept, regardless of how much he would love to spend a summer away from the Dursleys – especially now that he had a year of magical education under his belt, just one more thing for them to despise about him – because he hated feeling like a burden.

But Reborn was insistent, and Harry hadn't needed terribly much encouragement after the second offer, not after he thought about all the people he had known but didn't know, and how this was a chance to get to know them for real.

 **oOoOo**

Meeting Lambo _properly_ for the first time was… an odd experience.

For Harry, all of his memories of Lambo – from both his past and his not-future – revolved around a 5-6 year old version of him. But the Lambo living at the Sawada house, the Lambo standing in front of him, had just turned 10, and was something of an enigma to the young wizard.

Part of him had forgotten that Lambo would have aged since that unfortunate encounter with Vernon Dursley. Part of him had still been expecting a cow-print onesie.

That same part of him was thrown slightly off-balance by everyone he encountered in Namimori.

(He remembered Fuuta being taller than that. Everyone else was _too_ tall.)

It was somewhat of a relief to find most of them – save Lambo and I-Pin and Tsunayoshi's mother – evaluating him with a similar look of dissonance.

"You gave Lambo cookies," is the first thing this Lambo says to Harry when he finished looking him up and down.

His entire demeanour was calmer than Harry remembered, his voice less excitably high-pitched. The onesie had become a cow-print t-shirt. His hair was still a frizzy mess, but it no longer looked quite as capable of serving as some sort of extra-dimensional storage space.

Most of all, Harry was a little surprised Lambo even remembered that particular trip to the future. He hadn't expected it to be particularly impactful, but maybe Lambo just had a strong memory for certain subjects?

So Harry says, "I did," because he did, even if they hadn't been his to give at the time.

Tsunayoshi was watching them stare each other down with a ridiculously fond expression, like he knew something they didn't. (He probably did.)

Somehow, Harry had never felt more welcome.

 **oOoOo**

Harry spent that summer between his first and second years at Hogwarts living in Sawada Tsunayoshi's house.

It was crowded, and hectic, and Harry loved it.

Some days he was tutored on his flames. Others he was nagged into spending catching up on mundane subjects. And on his free days, he spent time bonding with the other people who lived at – or might as well live at – the Sawada house.

Once, he convinced Nana to let him bake. Lambo had sworn his undying loyalty to him in exchange for baked goods.

(He still sometimes talked about himself in the third person, but Harry found it a little bit endearing.)

I-Pin had started teaching him Chinese, at his request. Reborn was the one who suggested she also teach him martial arts.

Fuuta was wonderful to turn to when Harry wanted to spend time with someone a little bit older than himself, rather than younger.

A cynical, pessimistic part of Harry regretted coming here and meeting this people, because he was only going to have to leave again, but then he reminded himself that homesickness while at boarding school was a totally normal thing, and it didn't matter if the home he missed was different to the place he was supposed to call home.

 **oOoOo**

After that summer, it wasn't just Reborn and Tsunayoshi that Harry exchanged letters with during the school year, but Lambo, I-Pin and Fuuta as well.

Ron and Hermione seemed somewhat flabbergasted by the amount of mail he got, considering what few things he'd told them about the Dursleys, but the school year was chaotic enough that neither of them stopped to pry much for information.

It wasn't that Harry didn't want to tell them – there was nothing wrong with having friends and family – but he wasn't sure he could trust himself to talk about them while avoiding mentioning anything mafia-related without sounding too much like he was hiding things.

Learning that his ability to speak to snakes had a name was cool. People being petrified and Harry himself almost being killed by the biggest of snakes? Less cool.

 **oOoOo**

Harry made the mistake of actually talking about his harrowing near-death encounter with the spectre of Tom Riddle and the basilisk when he went home – he was no longer afraid to call it that – for the summer.

Almost a week passed by after he mentioned it where Harry swore Tsuna and his guardians would band together and forbid him from going back to school. The worst part was that Harry wasn't sure how hard he would fight the decision – two spectacular incidents in two years set a worrying precedent, and if Harry wanted to live to reach adulthood it might be safer to quit.

In the end they only resolved to work harder to train Harry over the break. Being able to defend himself was an important first step to his continued existence.

 **oOoOo**

Sirius Black was a surprise.

First, because he apparently wanted to kill Harry, and then, later, because he apparently _really did not_ want to kill Harry.

The dementors that came with his escape?

They quickly became the thing Harry hated most in this world.

He could deal with violence and threats to his life and being hated, but the way a dementor invaded your mind and dragged out your worst memories was enough to make a man ill.

(He fainted so often that year that the slytherins started calling him a delicate flower, but what would they know of the complex webs of pain and sorrow that lay within his memories?)

 **oOoOo**

Harry shouldn't have been as surprised by Hermione's time-turner as he was.

Of all the things the magical world had thrown at him, time travel was the most familiar concept after all. Somehow it had simply slipped his mind.

But a time-turner was nothing like Lambo's Ten Year Bazooka.

Even with all of his experiences with mist illusions, Harry found it incredibly disquieting following about their past selves, doing their utmost to stay hidden, especially from themselves.

It was… a dangerous invention. Moreso for Hermione than himself, but, he supposed, less so for Hermione – who was still aware of her own time-turner three hours ago and held the knowledge that she had been time-travelling all year – than for anyone else.

A person wasn't supposed to exist in two places in one moment in time. That was part of the reason why Lambo's bazooka made you switch places with your future self rather than just summoning them, not to mention the time limit.

If one had the patience to do so, they could travel back days, weeks, months even, and then live out all that time doing whatever they pleased.

An unsettling concept, even to someone with intimate knowledge of the existence of parallel worlds.

 **oOoOo**

After everything that had happened in his previous three years at Hogwarts, Harry couldn't even bring himself to be surprised when his name came out of the goblet, despite never having had even a second's worth of intent to try and enter such a notoriously dangerous tournament.

 **oOoOo**

When the champions' families arrived, Harry passed by a notably confused contingency of teachers and practically skipped over to a visibly amused Tsuna. Tsunayoshi's companion for this particular trip was the often surly Gokudera Hayato, who was caught in a strange limbo between wanting to be a professional and collected member of the Vongola, as Tsuna's Right Hand, and wanting to gawk at all the casual displays of magic that Harry had long been desensitized to.

Harry muffled a snicker in his hand.

"Thanks for coming," Harry said, smiling up at the man who had taught him what a family was supposed to be like. "It would have been a disaster if they'd tried to convince my aunt and uncle to come."

For a moment, Tsuna's face twisted into that distinctly displeased expression he always got whenever someone mentioned Harry's blood relatives. Then he ruffled Harry's hair, and Gokudera complained about the shoddy way he'd done his tie that morning, and everything was fine again.

The bewildered looks that followed them about that day were nothing in the face of Harry's contentment.

 **oOoOo**

Even over the roar of the crowd, Harry could pick out Gokudera's awestruck, excited exclamations at the sight of the dragons.

How was he supposed to be nervous in the face of that?

(There was nothing like facing down a nesting mother dragon to make you wish you had rain-class flames. But he managed, in the end, like he always did.)

 **oOoOo**

Harry was so pathetically god damned glad that the 'thing you treasure most' was more like 'the thing you treasure most that is currently on school grounds'.

He was also glad that Tsuna had been too busy to come watch the second task, and that no one had come in his place.

It was one thing to find Ron at the bottom of the lake; yes, Harry had read too much into that damned ominous song, but at least Ron knew magic. He might have been on less friendly terms with the redhead than normal, but he was still one of Harry's best friends – the shock at seeing him was real. But Harry wasn't sure he'd have been able to reign in his temper if he'd reached the merpeople's village and found Tsuna or, god forbid, Lambo (or I-Pin or Fuuta or any of them, but Harry could admit that out of all of them, Lambo held the largest part of his heart).

 **oOoOo**

The moment Harry and Cedric hit the ground after being unceremoniously portkeyed out of the maze, Harry threw up a mist illusion – secrecy be damned – and clasped a hand over Cedric's mouth, holding the pointer finger of his free hand to his own lips in a request for silence.

If Harry hadn't suspected Death Eater involvement from the very get-go, an illicit portkey to a shady graveyard would certainly have put his guard up.

This had been Harry's decision. He had offered to share the cup with Cedric. That made this Harry's responsibility, and _no one_ was dying on his watch.

Clutching at Harry's arm first in protest, and then in terror, Cedric paled drastically at his side as Wormtail ruthlessly slayed Cedric's illusory self.

Harry wanted to stay and find out what happened – his memories of that future world were largely and pointedly centred around those months where they stormed Merone Base and fought against the Real Six Funeral Wreaths and Byakuran – but he'd never put his illusions up against potions or rituals before. It was too risky.

Besides, Harry could guess what Wormtail was trying to do.

Inching his free hand along the ground, Harry snagged the cup, and the two of them were whisked away to the (relative) safety of Hogwarts once more.

"Don't tell anyone what you saw," Harry whispered urgently into Cedric's ear the moment the world stopped spinning, before the crowds could figure out how to react. "I'll talk, you nod."

Thankfully, the seventh year was too shaken up to protest.

So, huddled together like the two traumatised teenagers they (supposedly) were, Harry spun a story – that was barely even a lie, only one of omission – about how the cup dragged them somewhere far off, where they were attacked by a strange wizard before escaping, Cedric pale and wide-eyed, not adding details but not refuting any either.

The fake-Moody blew his own cover when he attacked Harry in the corridors several days later, in a fit of rage at his foiled plot.

Given that his imprisonment led to Ministry intervention the next year, Harry would always resent Crouch a little more for not reigning in his temper than for trying to have him killed.

 **oOoOo**

The Order of the Phoenix was a joke.

They couldn't even figure out his summer address to whisk him away to their 'totally super safe base', and had to resort to extending an invitation via Hermione – the only person he wasn't currently super annoyed at, because she had taken his interest in languages in stride during first year and was actually answering his questions in a way no one could directly accuse her of being disobedient, since wizards were generally too self-centred and magic-reliant to care about things like _learning languages_.

The only reason Harry had gone along with it – after consulting with Tsuna – was because he'd get to spend some time with Sirius.

When he arrived it was to an absurdly overblown interrogation about 'those strange muggles from the tournament' and where on earth he kept running off to over the summer since he wasn't with his relatives. Harry answered their questions with the level of detail he felt they deserved, offering 'family' and 'overseas' and then shutting down entirely, content to let the noise wash over him until they gave up.

Spending time with Hermione, Sirius and the Weasleys outside of school wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but the atmosphere inside the house was so suffocating that Harry spent half of his time regretting coming.

 **oOoOo**

Severus Snape was a man of many talents, but he didn't even need to use a single one of them to tell that Harry Potter wasn't taking this occlumency training seriously.

If he was a compassionate man, if he somehow _enjoyed_ teaching children, if this were a task he'd undertaken _willingly_ , he might have been open to exploring different avenues of explanation and practice until one of them stuck in Potter's frustratingly stubborn mind. But none of those things rang true, and from observation Potter had never excelled at theory in the first place, so Severus would continue with his methods of brute force until the boy stopped messing around and fought back.

It had been several weeks now since they began this farce, and Severus had seen snippets of daily life at Hogwarts, of ill-advised adventures, and small fragments of early childhood. What he had _not_ seen was progress.

Potter stood before him in his office, jaw set, hands balled into fists, staring defiantly up at him. This was beginning to become a familiar sight. He didn't want it to continue that way, but he refused to be the first to give up – these lessons would either end with Potter at least somewhat sufficient in protecting his own mind, or with Potter throwing in the towel.

"You know what to do," Severus intoned, lifting his wand. "Clear your mind. Resist."

Potter's lips twisted into a scowl, his clenched fists white-knuckled, but he inclined his head just slightly in affirmation.

For a fraction of a second, Severus' attention wandered to the rings the Potter boy always seemed to be wearing. On rare occasions – though he would always, _always_ write it off as his imagination – he thought he could see a purplish haze around the boy's hands.

Impossible.

Meeting Potter's hard gaze, Severus murmured the incantation and dove into the pool of his memories.

Every time he entered Potter's mind, Severus could tell there was something he was desperately trying to hide, more than anything else. He had been content to leave it be during past sessions, lest it be something dreadfully hormonal that he could happily go his entire life without witnessing, but tonight it was closer to the surface; Potter had fallen into the elementary trap of focussing too hard on what he was trying to keep hidden.

Perhaps he was being too lenient.

Perhaps, if he tore into Potter's most secret memories, the boy would take this more seriously.

Decision made, Severus delved deeper, riffling through Potter's mind.

Maybe it was instinct, but Potter seemed to know what he was aiming for. His mind was turbulent, but in a way that spoke more of panic than of purposeful misdirection. But Severus was no amateur. He could navigate the stormy seas of a child's mind in his sleep.

He may not be giving Potter's gung-ho Gryffindor attitude enough credit, however.

Right before reaching the memories he was most curious about, he was blindsided and dragged into a different memory.

 _Severus could tell the moment he fell into it that it was an old memory. He was incredibly gifted at mind magic and never doubted his own skills._

 _But that was why, when he observed his surroundings, he found himself flooded with confusion._

 _He was in a forest, at the edge of a lake._

 _A sweeping glance gave him information he had no idea how to process._

 _A long-haired man hovered high above the water, somehow sustained by unnaturally coloured flames._

 _A hoard of what_ looked _like Velociraptors – Severus recalled with some distaste how the boys at his primary school had been obsessed with dinosaurs – were charging an odd group of people._

 _The group of six – which included four teenagers and a_ child _, of all things – were sporadically armed and seemed ready to fistfight the creatures that couldn't possibly be dinosaurs._

 _And-_

 _And one of those teenagers was Harry Potter._

 _It was Potter, but older, just a bit; wary and scarred and bruised._

 _The memory was more than five years old, Severus couldn't refute that fact, and even more startling was that the memory wasn't a fabrication, nor had it been tampered with._

 _His abject shock at the ludicrous scene he'd been presented with allowed Potter to get the better of him._

Severus came back to himself to the sting of a misfired hex and the slight smell of burnt cloth.

Potter was breathing heavily, wide-eyed and terrified, but also, beneath it all, relieved.

When he relaxed his hands Severus spotted blood on Potter's palms.

Normally Severus would have explained it away as a result of Potter's attempt to banish him from his mind. But that self-satisfaction and relief hidden in Potter's expression and stance… that wasn't from accomplishing something. It was from successfully _not_ doing something.

Severus thought of the man in the sky, of his purple flames, of the flashes of colour he sometimes caught out of the corner of his eye, and he made a deal with himself.

On this one thing, Severus wouldn't push. He would leave those memories alone, and try and rid himself of them too. No one would believe him if he ever shared what he had seen, and he didn't have the first clue how to explain it even to himself.

This one mystery, Severus would leave with its secret keeper. He wasn't interested in the headache that would no doubt accompany answers.

Mending his robes with a wave of his wand, he met Potter's gaze once more.

"Again."

 **oOoOo**

Unfortunately for Voldemort – shoddily resurrected through a second-choice ritual and all the angrier for it – trying to play mind games with Harry was the worst plan he could have come up with.

It didn't even matter that Harry couldn't pull together an occlumency shield to save his life; he had always, _always_ , even before enhancing his innate perception skills through practice and exposure to foreign mist illusions, been able to tell the difference between dreams and reality.

It was one thing if Voldemort was sending him true visions of things that actually happened, but another thing entirely if he was sending him false visions to try and kick him into action.

If Harry had been capable of dream-walking, or knew at all how to operate this apparent mental link between them at will, he might have sent a little present to show his _gratitude_ when Voldemort tried to convince him that his beloved godfather was being held at the mercy of his Death Eaters.

He didn't go to the Ministry.

More fool to them if they had been lying in wait, hoping to ambush a panicked teenager.

 **oOoOo**

It happened more and more as they both got older, but sometimes Lambo – now a lackadaisical fourteen year old who was ditching his t-shirts for button-downs – would spend long moments watching Harry with this air of consideration about him.

Harry had always wondered how much of the future the kids remembered, and more than that, how much they really understood about it, but he'd never wanted to ask.

At eleven, maybe Lambo hadn't been able to make the connection, but Harry at almost sixteen didn't look much different to how he remembered being at seventeen.

But the same could be said of Harry.

Although he couldn't remember the teenage Lambo, he remembered the conflicted emotions his older self had possessed around the child Lambo. They had become close over the years, but it had taken Harry until now to put a name to some of those feelings.

He had loved Lambo, and the only reason he'd been able to identify that feeling was because he was starting to feel that way again.

Harry might have been courageous about many things, but not about matters of the heart.

 **oOoOo**

Horcruxes were just the _worst_ sort of bullshit.

Trust Dumbledore to keep highly pertinent information from everyone for more than a decade. Voldemort could've been dead as a doorknob by now if people had known this sort of thing back during his first reign of terror.

A dark part of Harry wondered if Dumbledore had planned his death to occur at such a weighted point in their weird information back-and-forth.

(Later he would find that, in a way, he really had done exactly that.)

Harry wondered if the Vindice had ever had a magical prisoner before. Getting Voldemort locked away in that eternal prison would certainly be easier than vanquishing him.

 **oOoOo**

Lambo was fifteen and the words were on the tip of Harry's tongue, but he was about to march into war, and he didn't have the heart for it.

 **oOoOo**

Harry didn't tell Tsuna and the others about the horcruxes, or his weirdly important role in a war that should have ended a generation ago.

He didn't want to worry them. But even more than that, he knew that if he told them, Tsuna would want to send something with him, and Harry, always selfish in his protection, didn't want to drag any of them into a war that didn't concern them.

Instead, he spent half of the summer break with them, then headed back to England to meet up with Ron and Hermione.

He used his flames so many times while they were on the run that he started having nightmares about being locked away by the Vindice, but his luck held true.

Right up until he pulled himself out of Snape's memories with the newfound knowledge that there was a _horcrux **inside of him**._

He slumped against the wall and laughed.

To think, he'd survived one harrowing future only to discover he was cursed to die regardless for the fate of the world – or at least, for the fate of a small portion of the world.

(Harry had zero faith in Voldemort's ability to ever rule over muggles on any sort of global scale, but enough people in the UK would die if Harry ran from this that he wouldn't be able to forgive himself.)

But if he just walked to his death the way Voldemort wanted him to, there was a good chance that no one would ever get word to his family that he had died. The school year would come to a close, and they would wait for Harry to come home, and he would simply never show up again. They would panic, and investigate, and eventually find out from some newspaper or a nasty gossiper that Harry had been killed by the Dark Lord on school grounds.

Forcing himself to his feet, Harry rummaged about through Snape's desk and salvaged some blank parchment, a quill, and a bottle of ink.

If he was going to do this, he was at least going to own up to it and tell his family himself.

He wrote two letters: one in Italian, for Lambo, and one in Japanese, for everyone.

He wrote things that he felt guilty about confessing on his deathbed, when no one would ever be able to do anything with the information, but they'd see it anyway if he crossed it out, and he didn't really have the wherewithal _not_ to leak his heart all over the pages.

When he was done he sealed them, addressed them, then, after finding Ron and Hermione, gave them to Hermione with instructions on how to send them if he didn't make it.

He told them it was only a precaution, trying to placate them in a time of high stress, but Harry fully expected the letters to be sent off.

 **oOoOo**

Death was… different to what Harry had expected.

Not that he had expected anything. That was sort of the point. Harry had figured that either you went on to become a ghost, because you were particularly attached to existence, or you just… ceased.

This foggy bullshit train station situation therefore was rather a shock.

So was seeing Dumbledore – or at the very least, something that had taken the appearance of Dumbledore.

Harry was still bitter about a lot of things the elderly headmaster had done, but he let him say his piece, because he was the only person around and an explanation was an explanation no matter who it came from.

The only thing that mattered was when the maybe-Dumbledore mentioned a choice.

Harry didn't give a damn what the consequences might be. The horcrux had been destroyed, and if there was a path that meant he was leaving this battle still breathing, then he was taking it.

The moment he finished that thought he found himself blinking awake, face down on the forest floor. Voices rang out somewhere overhead.

Battle instincts screaming at him, he laid out an illusion of his dead body and then high-tailed it out of the clearing. He was super not keen on dying again today, and even if he could sneak up and stealthily take out Nagini while they were all cheering over his corpse, it would be incredibly tough to then manage to take out Voldemort amidst so many of his followers when he was alone in the forest.

He felt a little bad about including Hagrid in the illusion, but the half-giant was a terrible actor, and he would've shattered the illusion's grasp on everyone else when he reacted.

 **oOoOo**

Two days after the battle, when the bodies of the dead had all been collected but few people had yet gathered themselves enough to leave the castle, Hermione slipped into the boys' dormitory, an unreadable look on her face.

When she returned the letters to Harry, there had been something endlessly sad in her eyes. The seal hadn't _looked_ tampered with, but Hermione wasn't known as a brilliant witch for no reason. He suspected she might have read the letter he'd left for Lambo, full of rambling confessions and grief and regrets.

(Thankfully he hadn't made any mention of the mafia in it. That was a conversation he'd rather not have right now.)

Harry hadn't really left the dorm since he first crashed there. He hadn't wanted to walk the halls, see the damage from the battle. Even before he'd retired for sleep that first night, he'd seen the way people looked at him. He wasn't ready to face them.

"I… may have done something rash," Hermione admitted, standing hesitantly at the foot of Harry's bed. "It's okay if you're angry, but…"

Harry sat up, confused as she made a beckoning motion towards the door.

He opened his mouth to ask what she was doing, but then the doorway was suddenly full of people, spilling unapologetically into the room.

Tsuna, Fuuta, I-Pin. Yamamoto and Gokudera.

Lambo.

Hermione smiled sheepishly and backed off.

Harry could only gape as they crowded around his bed.

"What…?"

"Your friend got in contact with us and told us about the battle," Yamamoto explained. His gaze said that they would be having _words_ about his secrecy at a later date.

I-Pin perched herself on the end of his bed, eyes sad and worried.

Lambo buried himself into Harry's side, teary-eyed and upset.

As someone who always bottled his emotions up and choked down his resentment, Harry had always admired the fact that as he got older Lambo never grew ashamed of being an emotionally expressive person, never tried to shut that part of himself away.

Right now, Harry wasn't sure he was even capable of tears, that was how emotionally wrung out he was. He thought he might cry, if he could. For half the battle he'd been convinced he would never see any of these people again, and yet here they were.

He wrapped his arms around Lambo and held him tight, rolling his eyes at that knowing look on Tsuna's face.

Of course he knew. He'd always known.

There was probably some betting pool somewhere about when Harry would get his shit together and just confess.

And he _would_ , okay? Dying had given him a very up-close and personal experience with how unexpected life could be, and how easily it could be cut short. He couldn't keep it locked away forever.

But that was still a conversation for another day.

Glancing over at Hermione, who was loitering awkwardly near the door, Harry mouthed 'thank you' in her direction.

She smiled, then slipped out the door to leave them be.

* * *

 **A/N:** Aaaand oops they still aren't dating.

I have one more idea (atm) for this... are we calling it a series? Might as well. Anyway, it's jumping back to the TYL arc world, but it's about the war against Voldemort in that post-Byakuran world.


End file.
